Phanta Progress Update 5/25

I've made a number of changes to Phanta this last week and I've been sharing them around on forums, decided to collect all the info and post it to here for posterity! A lot of this has been in response to some very helpful comments by players, so I want to give a big thanks to everyone who's been giving me crits and pushing the game to improve.

-I've altered the lighting engine to create more colorful scenes, and you can see an example of the new color scheme below (from back when I still had some programming kinks to work out)

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-I've updated the mouse movement and made it a little more "smart," so characters will typically circle around objects if they're mistakenly guided into one.

-Battle speed has been played with a bit to make faster, more dynamic battles. What this translates to is:
1- When you're not selecting an attack, battle speed is bumped up 4x so that the turns quickly fly by. Once your selection menu is up, though, it resumes its usual speed so you have time to select attacks.
2- The fewer party members you have, the faster battles move since you have less to select for
So battles go by a good bit quicker now, without becoming more challenging.

-Enemy "death" animations now show them becoming smaller ghostly versions of themselves and rising up offscreen, something more fitting of the ghost theme.

-Made a number of edits to dialog boxes, making them better match in quality with their portraits:

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All those in addition to numerous little tweaks, bugfixes and housecleaning to tighten the game. I've made pretty decent progress as far as plot/cutscene stuff goes as well. A demo might be fast approaching once I have a lot time to sit down and crunch on the game again.

Here's a parting little screenshot with background art I've just done today;

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19 Years

Whelp! Today's my 19th birthday. All in all it's a pretty godawful boring year. I'm not quite in my second decade, and I can't do anything I couldn't do when I was 18, legally speaking. I've essentially resigned myself to having a boring year to reflect a boring age. Or who knows, maybe it'll be awesome!

One thing that's looking to make this year a good one is Phantasmaburbia! Let's talk about that for a bit, shall we? (It's really interesting if you juxtapose this birthday post with the one I did last year and even the year before that, when I was finishing and starting work on Dubloon, respectively.) I've been working on it as diligently as possible, but I must say, school has been a much larger timesink than it's been in the last couple years (which is why I'm writing this post a few days in advance just to ensure it is delivered on time!). I guess that's college! I'll get out of classes in June, which will definitely mean a rapid increase of production rate.

But there's cool stuff to report! We've introduced a new member to the "team," and he goes by Mack151, or sometimes, Rockythechao. He did a really excellent Let's Play series on Dubloon (the original!) and Escape from the Underworld, and he's volunteered to offer his beautiful art services to the game in the form of new character portraits! Look at these beauties (click on them!):


So that's the big news of the day! I look forward to sharing more as this little project continues...

PS Have you seen The Room? It's my current obsession. You can find it online for free with the right Google searches, just saying.

Quick Phantasmaburbia Update

Since originally posting Phantasmaburbia, I've been pushing out small updates making little fixes and changes to match complaints and speed/gfx issues. I've just now uploaded what I *think* is the final bugfix version.


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The total list of fixes IS (as I remember it):
-Expanded config options including scaling, a toggle for high detail gfx, and music volume
-New battle transition that renders easier
-New run animation
-Faster walking/run speeds
-New background effects in Spirit Tunnels
-Some optimization of effects (particularly focused on lighting effects in indoor areas)
-Slight dialog edits for brevity and clarity

IF you played it before and had issues with speed, gfx or anything else listed above, I encourage you to try it out again and let me know if it plays well for you now. Even if things are still running slow or looking bad, you at least have the option of turning stuff off to make it work.

Get it at GameJolt!
Or... Get it at YoYoGames!

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What this now means is I'll be comfortably pushing forward with more content creation. When the final final version of the game is ready and for sale, I don't think I'll publicly release any gameplay aside from what is present now. BUT, in the intervening time I'll probably put out another demo or two for testing and feedback purposes, so what that translates to is you'll get to play more of the game's content for free if you keep an eye out and play these little demos as I build up to the game's completion.

Here's a parting screenshot of what's to come...

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PS... Watch this site closely for the next week or so to catch the release of Pollushot on the iTouch/Android app stores!!